Radio in the Global Age

Transcription

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3 Radio in the Global Age

4 For Henrietta

5 Radio in the Global Age David Hendy Polity Press

6 Copyright David Hendy 2000 The right of David Hendy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Published in the USA by Blackwell Publishers Inc. Commerce Place 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hendy, David. Radio in the global age / David Hendy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN X ISBN (paper) 1. Radio broadcasting. I. Title. HE8694.H dc21 Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Plantin by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by T.J. International Limited, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper.

7 Contents Figures Tables Boxes Abbreviations Acknowledgements vii viii ix x xi Introduction 1 Radio in the social landscape 1 The structure of this book 7 1 Industry 9 The global structures of radio 10 Industrial sectors 11 Funding and goals 14 Local, national and international dimensions 21 Commercialization 24 Diversity 26 Consolidation and control 41 Technology 48 A global or a local industry? 60 2 Production 69 Producers 71 Producing actuality 73 Producing narratives 78

8 vi Contents Producing liveness 87 Time and money 91 Formats 94 Programme formats 95 Station formats 98 Schedules 103 Creativity versus predictability Audiences 115 The act of listening 116 The radio audience 122 The active audience? Meanings 148 Radio as communicator 149 Radio texts: talk and music 155 Talk 155 Music 168 Radio and modernity: time, place and communicative capacity 177 Time 178 Place 185 Communicative capacity Culture 194 Radio and democratic culture 195 Radio and identity 214 Radio, music and cultural change 224 Conclusion 236 Bibliography 241 Index 253

9 Figures 1.1 Radio advertising expenditure growth compared to GDP growth in the UK, The most popular radio station formats in the USA in How deregulation can lead to new forms of ownership/ format concentration World map showing extent of digital audio broadcasting in A clock format for a breakfast show on a typical UK commercial-radio station with an MOR or Gold format A BBC Radio 4 commissioning brief for independent production companies 106

10 Tables 1.1 Cost per hour of originated programmes on BBC services: a comparison between network radio and network TV, Key players in UK commercial radio industry and some of their other interests The impact of genres on programme-making costs for two BBC network radio services, Some current station formats in the USA 100

11 Boxes 3.1 Listening patterns during the weekdays: the example of BBC Radio Music as a framing or boundary mechanism Ideological aspects of talk on the radio What is happening when a DJ talks over music? The Rwandan Genocide broadcasts BBC Radio 1 re-invents itself 231

12 Abbreviations ABC AOR BBC CBC CHR CPBS CRCA CRN DAB ENPS ENPSN FCC IRN MCPS MOR NAC NERA NPR ORF OTH PPL PRS RAJAR RSL RTLM SABC Soft AC VOA Australian Broadcasting Corporation Adult (or Album) Orientated Rock British Broadcasting Corporation Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Contemporary Hit Radio Central People s Broadcasting Station (China) Commercial Radio Companies Association Canadian Radio Networks Digital Audio Broadcasting Electronic News Production System Electronic News Production System Newsletter Federal Communications Commission Independent Radio News Mechanical Copyright Protection Society Middle of the Road New Adult Contemporary National Economic Research Associates National Public Radio Österreicher Rundfunk Opportunities to Hear Phonographic Performance Limited Performing Rights Society Radio Joint Audience Research Radio Services Limited Radio Télévision Libre Milles Collines South African Broadcasting Corporation Soft Adult Contemporary Voice of America

13 Acknowledgements Very many friends and colleagues have helped me with this book at various stages. My first debt is to colleagues in the School of Communication, Design and Media at the University of Westminster those who offered feedback on earlier drafts, who provided encouragement, or who simply enabled me to have the time off normal teaching duties in order to write it. Paddy Scannell and Peter Goodwin have my thanks in particular, but also Dave Laing, John Tulloch, Norton York, Jim Latham, Michael Dodd and Tim Carter. There is a growing sense of the importance of radio in academic study, perhaps illustrated most recently by the founding of the UK s Radio Studies Network : it provides a valuable source of ideas and help beyond the traditional walls of a single university department, and I have benefited directly from discussions with Peter Lewis, Tim Wall, Ken Garner, Eryl Price-Davies and Tim Crook in particular. I also owe thanks to my students over the past six years. They have taught me far more than they realize, and working with them has allowed me to test ideas, helped me change some of my assumptions and expand my horizons. I have been supported and helped, too, by all those at Polity Press John Thompson, Gill Motley, Lynn Dunlop, Pamela Thomas and Debbie Seymour in particular who have shown patience and professionalism throughout the process of putting this book together. I should also thank the anonymous Polity readers who made several valuable suggestions which have helped me to improve upon an earlier draft. Though the book draws on much academic literature, it would have been impossible to write without the help, advice, discussions and interviews I have been able to have over the past year or two with

14 xii Acknowledgements many people in the radio industry. In the BBC, this includes Chris Lycett, Jeff Smith, Ian Parkinson, Wendy Pilmer, Matthew Bannister and staff in the Corporate Press Office, BBC Radio International, and BBC Digital Radio. Others who have helped me a great deal include three producers in particular Piers Plowright, Matt Thompson of Loftus Productions and Jefferson Graham, formerly of the Independent Radio Group as well as Samantha Moy from Somethin Else, Wendy Marr from Ladbroke Productions, Sue Clarke, Stewart Clark from Music Alliance, Susan Smith from Digital One, Dr Gary Heller from Radio and Records Online in Los Angeles, Mike Powell from UKRD and Julie Unsworth from WorldDAB Forum. All these people have helped in numerous ways, but my biggest debt is to my family, who have put up with many months of me being in a distracted and neglectful mood. So let me here thank Eloise and Morgan who are both young enough still to be mystified by the voices coming from their father s radio sets and, above all, Henrietta, who has been unstinting in her support and encouragement from beginning to end. To her I dedicate this book in friendship and love. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: National Economic Research Associates for figure 1.1 from NERA 1998: Report on UK Commercial Radio s Future: Final Report, p. 18; Radio and Records and Dr Gary Heller for figure 1.2 from National Format Shares in Radio and Records Ratings Directory: Ratings, Industry Directory & Program Supplier Guide, vol. 2, Los Angeles: Radio and Records, p. 9 (Copyright 1999 Radio and Records, Inc. reprinted by permission); Taylor & Francis Group/ITPS Ltd for figure 1.3 from Wallis, R. and Malm, K. 1993, From State Monopoly to Commercial Oligopoly: European Broadcasting Policies and Popular Music Output Over the Airwaves, in T. Bennett, S. Frith, L. Grossberg, J. Shephard, and G. Turner (eds), Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, London: Routledge, p. 165, and for box 4.1 and several other extracts from Crisell, A. 1994, Understanding Radio, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, p. 50 and others;world DAB Forum for figure 1.4; Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd., for figure 2.1 from McLeish, R. 1994, Radio Production, 3rd edn, Focal Press, p. 159, and for table 2.1 which draws upon data in Keith, M. C. 1997, The Radio Station, 4th edn, Focal Press, pp ; BBC Radio for extracts from their Radio 4 Commissioning Guidelines 1997/8, reproduced in figure 2.2 and box 3.1; SAGE Publications Ltd for box 4.2, which includes extracts from Higgins, C. S. and Moss, P. D. 1984, Radio Voices, in Media, Culture & Society, volume 6, pp ; Dr

15 Acknowledgements xiii Tim Wall of the University of Central England for box 4.3, which is extracted from The Meanings of Black and Dance Music in Contemporary Music Radio, a paper delivered to the Third Triennial British Musicological Societies Conference, University of Surrey, Guildford, July 1999; The Observer, for box 5.2, which reproduces a news report, Rockers issue writ to regain status, by Michael Ellison in The Guardian, 1 March 1996, p. 2. Parts of my discussion of radio, music and cultural change in chapter five are drawn from original research which is due to be published more extensively in the journal Media, Culture & Society in November 2000 in an article provisionally titled Pop music radio in the public service: BBC Radio 1 and new music in the 1990s ; similarly, parts of my discussion of digital broadcasting appear in more extensive form in the USA in the May 2000 edition of the Journal of Radio Studies. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. However, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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17 Introduction Radio in the social landscape Marshall McLuhan famously described radio as a hot medium. Calling some media hot and others like television cool was the sort of grand concept which helped make McLuhan s name in the 1960s. And nearly forty years on the idea remains striking in its originality. But not, I would say, entirely convincing. For a start, his classification now seems rather topsy-turvy. Take his definition of television. It is cool, he suggested, because it gives us a low definition sense of the world: the information it provides is meagre, unclear, equivocal. It is, so to speak, like a cartoon compared with a photograph a mere outline. Radio, however, is hot because it is just like a fully-fledged photograph it extends one single sense in high definition. This all makes radio sound rather powerful. But that was not McLuhan s view. He saw the future belonging to cool media like television. People in the late twentieth century, he suggested, want room in their lives for differences, ambiguities, alternative interpretations and would therefore reject radio s overheated certainties certainties which set fire to all ambivalence. So McLuhan believed that radio s time would pass it would gradually be displaced by the cool media of the electronic revolution, media which do not privilege any voice or point of view (McLuhan 1994; Cashmore and Rojek 1999: 332 4). Today, though, it appears to many observers that it is television which gives us the world in high-definition, with its vivid images overpowering us, casting us into a role as passive observers of the world. The rhetoric surrounding radio, however, is suffused with the

18 2 Introduction language of McLuhan s cool ambiguity. We talk of radio s ability to stimulate the mind s eye that in giving us a sense of the world that is entirely lacking in any visual clues, it demands more, not less, audience participation (Crisell 1994; Shingler and Wieringa 1998). We talk of radio s ability to keep us company, even to draw us into new relationships, by building up a sense of intimacy with broadcasters and fellow listeners (Douglas 1999).We talk of its ability to be a wider window on the world, to mark out a discursive space where people s voices can be heard and a debate sustained in a way that makes the world and all the people in it somehow more tangible, more real (Scannell 1996).We even talk of its powers of emancipation a cheap and technically easy medium to master, allowing people otherwise excluded from the mainstream media a voice and a role, a real chance of interpreting the world for themselves (O Connor 1990; Lloréns 1991; Hochheimer 1993). And radio does not seem to be facing extinction at the hands of television either. There is a lot of it around. Some 9,000 stations across Europe, another 11,000 or so in the USA, many thousands more in Latin America, and growing numbers in Asia, Africa and Australasia perhaps somewhere in the region of 40,000 or more stations worldwide when various community stations and pirates are also taken into account. This is much, much higher than the number of television stations worldwide. And while television is an experience still fixed largely in the home, we listen to all this radio in more circumstances and in more places around the world: on a personal stereo as we walk or jog down the street, in the car when we travel to work, in the house while we prepare our meals. In the developing world, radio is a conveniently cheap and portable medium wherever poverty and the absence of an electricity supply places television beyond the reach of most people. It is also a conveniently oral medium wherever literacy is low. Unsurprisingly, then, the number of radio receivers owned in many parts of Africa and Asia is many, many times more than the number of television sets. Radio remains the world s most ubiquitous medium, certainly the one with the widest reach and greatest penetration (Pease and Dennis 1993: xii). Despite or perhaps because of this pervasive quality, radio is for those of us in the developed world a taken-for-granted part of our lives.we probably have four or five sets positioned around our homes, and most of us listen for about three hours each day almost as much time as we spend watching television. We use it and generally trust it for news and information about the world, and in the USA talk-radio galvanizes public opinion and influences policymakers. We talk to it, apparently finding it easier sometimes to call radio phone-ins and confide in an anonymous listening audience

19 Introduction 3 than in our own friends and family. Above all, perhaps, we listen to it even sing along to it in its role as the world s most ubiquitous transmitter of recorded pop music. Even as McLuhan first espoused his theory of hot and cold media in 1964, radio was reinventing itself as the medium for music and for teenagers, where the young could listen to their music on cheap portable transistors away from the rest of the family (Douglas 1999; Fornatale and Mills 1980; Barnard 1989). Nearly four decades on, the repertoire of pop music is infinitely bigger, and the explosion in the number of radio stations appears to offer all of us, from the very young to the very old, the chance to tune in to our music. In the constellation of radio services at the start of the new millennium, we cannot help but feel that there is something for everyone. Yet we do not wonder in awe at this medium any more why should we when it is simply there in the background, almost all the time? And we don t read or hear about the radio medium very much either it rarely makes the front pages, rarely arouses the same sort of heated debates over say, violence or sex or sensationalism, that television seems to engender. It has its stars the odd Chris Evans here or Howard Stern there but it is mostly not an industry of big stars, or big money, or big corporate players. It is relatively prosperous a fast-expanding area of advertising and a sector prone to frenzied take-overs but in the media pond it is still an economic minnow, and in society as a whole it is largely ignored. In short, its profile in the social landscape is small and its influence large. This introduction is not a manifesto for triumphalism, though. And the book as a whole is not a celebration of radio. Certainly, were McLuhan to be alive today he might be forced to admit that radio not only survives, it often thrives. But this, really, is beside the point. The critical question is, what sort of radio do we have nowadays? And what role does it play in contemporary society? Another Canadian, Jody Berland, writing almost exactly thirty years after her compatriot McLuhan, looked around her and was struck by the ubiquity, not so much of radio in general, but of one form of radio in particular, namely commercially funded and highly formatted music radio.this, she argues: place[s] together sound messages that are disparate in terms of their location of origin, their cultural purpose, and their form, in order to create a continuous enveloping rhythm of sound and information. The rhythm s reason isn t about insight, originality, history, logic or emancipation. It s about the market. Since the continuous rhythm of sound is more powerful than any single item enveloped in its progression, the reception of particular items is substantially determined by the larger

20 4 Introduction discourse of radio programming, which teaches us addiction and forgetfulness. In commercial radio, the pleasures of location and identity, of specific recognitions or discoveries, are sacrificed to the (real) pleasures of the media s boundless hospitality, which defends itself against anarchy by being totalitarian in its mode of address and in its structuring of programme, genre, and rhythm. (1993b: 211) There are interesting echoes here. What Berland sees as radio s totalitarian mode of address conveys something of McLuhan s hot media which extend one sense in high-definition (1994: 22). Berland s listeners are overwhelmed, again much like McLuhan s are excluded by the complete lack of ambivalence in a medium s message. Berland s answer to the question, what sort of radio do we have nowadays, suggests that although we might have travelled a long way since 1964, we might have ended up somewhere close to where we began. The American author Susan Douglas puts it in similar, though perhaps more vividly personal terms: Whether you re in Providence or Albuquerque, the music...is the same....formats allow us to seek out a monotone mood with only the tiniest surprises....djs differ in their sense of where things are headed. Some feel that the industry is so powerfully centralized and consolidated, so in the grip of [audience] research, consultants, and investment groups, that insurgencies are no longer possible. They are pessimistic that radio stations will ever again regard listeners as music lovers instead of niche markets. They note that those, especially young people, who are looking for community-building communication technologies that allow for independent, unconventional expression, are deserting radio for the Internet.... But I, and millions like me, don t have a radio station to listen to anymore. (1999: 347, 354, 356) Douglas surveys a media landscape changed almost beyond recognition since the early 1960s. Radio in America has always been run on commercial lines, of course, in contrast to the more pluralist mix of commercial, state-controlled and public-service stations across Europe and elsewhere. But, as Blumler describes it, in using a term borrowed from the economist Joseph Schumpeter, there has been a gale of destruction unleashed on electronic media systems throughout the advanced industrial world in the last three decades (1991: 194). A relatively stable pattern, in which a large number of small commercial local radio stations, perhaps co-existing with some national networks, and broadcasting a fairly wide range of programming to mass audiences, has been disturbed. State regulation has given way in leaps and starts to market regulation, and technological changes satellite delivery systems, automation, computerization

21 Introduction 5 and so on have unleashed a quickening process of change in contemporary society as a whole. One recurring aspect of these changes is the sense in which the world is rapidly being moulded into a shared social space, and globalization is the conveniently permeable term often employed to encompass this process in all its aspects. Globalization, as many writers warn, is a term in danger of becoming the cliche of our times, but it does perhaps capture some of the lived experience of an epoch an experience characterized by the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999: 1 2). Radio, so long thought of as a predominantly local medium, would appear at first to fit rather uneasily within this broader debate. But if this book has a unifying theme it is this: that radio, though very often local, and so very cheap and easy to set up for oneself, and with so many qualities all of its own, is nonetheless a medium that is fully part of the electronic mass-media environment. It may have different qualities to television most obviously that it is a sound-based medium, not a visual one but it is similarly engaged in the task of mass-producing something called broadcasting, a time-based activity, domestic in scale and rapid in turnover, pulling together news, information, entertainment, music and so on day-after-day and yearafter-year. It may be television s poor relation, but there is still money to be made in radio, and many of the same processes the growth of multinational corporations, the splitting of audiences into niche markets, the drive to reduce costs and maximize profits can, I think, be used to explain many of its characteristics. It may evoke nostalgic associations with the music of our youth or a harmless amateurism characterized by radio hams, community stations and heroic pirates, or even a spirit of experimentation and artistry in sound, but it is first and foremost an industry an industry that may bring pleasure and contribute much to our cultural life, but an industry all the same, and one with global dimensions and a global reach that gives it an influential place in shaping our cultural lives. It is a medium I love a medium I know a little personally from the inside but focussing on its unique qualities, even talking too much of a Golden Age of radio, as many aficionados are tempted to do, would be to do it a disservice, I think: it would make it too special, too different, and as a result keep it rather isolated from interesting contemporary debates. Radio, then, needs to be reconnected with the mainstream of media and communication studies. It is a medium through which we can explore issues of policy, technology, identity, ideology and culture, just as fruitfully as by studying the other media television, cinema or the press. Our efforts, though, must have one clear proviso. We cannot jump from accepting radio s relevance in broader media

22 6 Introduction debates towards any attempt at a Grand Theory of radio. Perhaps such an attempt would be dangerous enough for any of the massmedia, but for radio it is particularly unwise. First, the sheer quantity of radio around us presents an insurmountable empirical task: a lifetime s study would not allow us to listen to more than a fraction of output, so any analysis will end up being very partial. Secondly, the range of activity at any given time, too, is huge tiny pirate and community stations, so-called micro -radio stations, large national networks, multinational satellite services, syndicated chains and groups, a burgeoning number of Internet-only radio stations all broadcasting almost anything from non-stop urban rap to businessnews: these strikingly different phenomena cannot easily be grouped under the one heading of radio and explained in the same way. Thirdly, radio can sometimes be an extraordinarily dynamic medium changing too quickly to let us see it properly. Douglas talks of radio s technical insurgency, of how, because corporate control is never complete in such a do-it-yourself technology, it has reinvented itself so frequently: It was just at those moments when programming seemed so fixed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and again in the late 1960s and early 1970s that off in the audio hinterlands programming insurgencies revolutionized what we heard on the air. When social movements and radio have intersected, previously forbidden and thus thrilling listening possibilities have emerged. (1999: 357) Radio, then, is simultaneously more taken-for-granted than television and paradoxically a larger, more diverse, more changeable, field of study. I will not, then, offer a theory of radio here, nor even attempt anything approaching a comprehensive global survey. What I do hope to achieve in the space of this book are two things. First, to sketch out some connections between the many tightlyfocussed micro studies of particular radio stations or programmes around the world with some of the macro ideas contained in more general studies of media, communication and society. It sometimes involves a leap of faith to discuss in the same breath American and British radio, let alone aboriginal radio in Australia and pop music on the Internet. Nonetheless, to do so reminds us that some more systematic attempt at what Beck (1998) calls mid-level study needs to be made of radio in the future. It also reminds us, perhaps, that not all radio is the radio that we listen to, or would even like to listen to. Secondly, despite the complexity with which I have characterized the radio landscape as a whole, I hope to draw out some of the central paradoxes of the medium. Recurring themes are discernible. One

23 Introduction 7 dichotomy which weaves itself through the chapters of this book, for example, is that between the unifying powers of a medium like radio, and the ability it apparently has to pull us apart into separate audience niches. Scannell has written extensively on radio s (and television s) ability to carve out a public sphere, not just in an austere political sense but also in terms of providing a space for shared fun and sociability (1991, 1996). As radio s technical reach around the globe has expanded, so too has the scope of this public sphere. Globalization makes the world a smaller place for those who produce radio everywhere is within their reach; it simultaneously expands the horizons of listeners, who can experience distant events and people and music in a way that previous generations could not. But there is something else happening too. There is a process in which more and more stations help divide the listening communities into a larger number of separate communities, defined it seems by ever narrower tastes in music or talk. We may still listen, Berland intimates, but we in fact hear less (1993b: 211). The questions at hand, then, are these: how do such contradictory processes unfold? Does radio connect us with wider imagined communities in a way that somehow frees us from the geography of where we live, or does it take away the shared experiences once regarded as a central feature of broadcasting and that once seemed to bring us together? Does radio in the global age give us a larger window on the world, or expose us dreadfully to the homogenized and banal output of a few multinational media chains and record companies? Is radio as a whole defined by these conflicts, or are we talking of different kinds of radio? We may not be able to answer all these questions, but asking them is a start. The structure of this book In talking of recurring themes, I hope to suggest that no one aspect of radio can be fully understood without some reference to three interrelated aspects of the medium: first, the ways in which it is produced, secondly the form and content of its programming what media analysis generally calls the medium s texts and thirdly the interpretations and reactions of its consumers, the listeners. No discussion of the music played on radio, for example, can make much sense without some parallel discussion of the economic forces at play within the media and music industries. Or, for that matter, without some discussion of the way we listen to radio and extract some meaning from its programmes. In broad terms, then, this book adopts the same structure used by similar studies of popular music and of

24 8 Introduction television (Longhurst 1995; Abercrombie 1996). Except, that is, in one minor respect: that I have preferred to discuss the consumption of radio, the way listeners listen to it, before moving on to discuss more directly the meanings attached to its output and its wider cultural impacts. This is not an attempt to make a statement, merely to point out that, in radio at least, it appears to me that the listeners whether as free and active citizens or as more passive members of a mass-audience market provide such a central perspective on all that follows, that to treat them as mere consumers and not as in some sense also the producers of radio is to misunderstand the medium and, so to speak, put the cart before the horse. Specifically, then, chapter 1 looks at the way radio is produced as an industry, and focuses on the changes taking place which affect production on a large and global scale. Chapter 2 narrows the focus to look at the way radio is produced on a day-to-day basis within stations and programme-teams in particular, it looks at the way the freedom of radio producers is constrained by a range of aesthetic, financial and organizational factors. Chapter 3 discusses the listeners to radio how we listen, and how the way we listen in turn shapes the production of programmes and the meanings they may convey. Chapter 4 attempts to explore some of the innate qualities and meanings that can be attached to various types of radio and, in particular, to the talk and the music we find commonly broadcast; it also tries to draw together some of the threads of debate on radio s relationship with our sense of time and place in the age of modernity. Finally, chapter 5 is an attempt to map out some of the cultural impacts the medium appears to have in contemporary society in three main areas in democratic culture, in our sense of identity (whether defined linguistically, geographically or ethnically), and in its ability to shape our musical tastes. Though the book as a whole has aspirations to be holistic in tone, it will have many omissions, for all the reasons I have discussed. Even so, the hope is that readers can test some of the specific or abstract ideas explored here against their own radio listening, and alongside the many thousands of programmes and stations I have never listened to, let alone written about.

25 1 Industry This chapter aims to analyse the ways in which radio is organized as an industry. This must be a starting point for any analysis of radio as a medium, since the commercial, political and technological context within which radio is produced has a direct bearing on the form and content of the programming that we hear on our radio sets. The major difficulty is that any attempt to characterize the structure of a media industry is to aim at a fast-moving target, since radio, like television, is changing quickly in terms of how it is owned, produced, distributed and consumed. The chapter is therefore designed, not so much to establish the existing patterns of radio, but to establish the dynamic forces which are shaping the medium at the start of the twenty-first century. First, the chapter offers different ways in which the radio industry can be categorized in global terms. This includes an examination of the basic economics of radio and the way in which this helps define its public or commercial goals. Secondly, it identifies two main forces for change: commercialization and rapid technological development. Many media analyses of the television and film industries have taken ownership as a central issue, arguing that a concentration of control into the hands of an ever smaller number of ever larger multinational conglomerates has created globalized patterns of production, programming and viewing. Although there are clearly parallel processes at work in the radio industry, exaggerated by many of the technological developments, this chapter will argue that the outcomes are likely to be be somewhat different. The third part of the chapter therefore focusses on how the industry can be understood in terms of two apparently contradictory processes: on the one hand, the consolidation of ownership and programme formats

26 10 Industry into a few dominant brands, and on the other hand, the fragmentation of radio into what appears at least to be a larger number of stations and new players aiming specialized programming at ever smaller audiences. In so doing, the chapter aims to identify the relevance to radio of certain ideas raised by political economy and cultural theory. The global structures of radio The radio industry has always been a relatively small player within the media as a whole. Head and Sterling estimated that in the late 1980s, some 60,000 worked directly in radio in the USA, compared with about 168,000 in broadcast and cable television and more than 900,000 in a single corporation like General Motors (1990: ); by the mid 1990s, the number working in radio had reached more than 100,000, but was also starting to fall again (Keith 1997: 31). In the UK, the number employed was put at about 3,800 in the early 1990s (Woolf and Holly 1994; Murroni et al. 1998) though this appears not to have included those working within the BBC who served both radio and television, nor those in commercial production houses and independent companies, and the real number is now probably nearer 10,000 still low compared with an estimate of about 36 40,000 employed in the UK television industry (Goodwin 1998: ). And the largest radio operators, if they are not subsumed within bigger broadcasting or media organizations, have significantly smaller turnovers of revenue than their television counterparts: the BBC spends about a quarter of its income on its domestic radio services typical of similar organizations across Europe, and the sort of funding provided for National Public Radio by the USA s Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Ledbetter 1997: 121). Capital Radio, the UK s richest commercial radio company had an annual turnover of about 78 million in 1996 compared with Carlton Television s 1.67 billion (NERA 1998: 21; Carlton 1998: 1). The radio industry in Europe as a whole has an annual turnover of some $8.8 billion in the USA it is now over $15 billion though again, these figures are a fraction of the size of that for television (Tyler and Laing 1998: 5; RAB (US) 1999). Yet, if the profits to be made from radio are relatively modest, the industry is much more pervasive than television. In the USA alone, where there are some 3,500 television services, there are well over 11,000 radio stations in other words, about three times as many (FCC 1999). Even much smaller countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece have some 500 or 600 radio stations each. There

27 Industry 11 is a decisive economic basis for this profusion: at any level, radio is significantly cheaper to produce than television. One hour of network radio costs the BBC about one-twentieth of the outlay on an hour of network television (see table 1.1). A local commercial station, with smaller overheads, could broadcast 24 hours a day at an average cost of well under 1,000 per hour (Graham 1999). A micro-radio or pirate operator could start transmitting radio with a one-off investment in equipment of little more than one thousand pounds. The radio industry as a whole, then, consumes a much smaller share of resources than the television industry, but produces more output through many, many more outlets. Industrial sectors Amid this bewildering array of activity, some general patterns are discernible. One broad distinction that can be drawn is between four overlapping activities in radio regulation, servicing, broadcasting and production. The regulation of radio springs originally from the need to manage the relatively scarce resource of the world s electromagnetic spectrum so that at the very least there is little or no interference between the signals from different stations. Internationally, the spectrum is managed between countries by the International Table 1.1 Cost per hour of originated programmes on BBC services: a comparison between network radio and network TV, Radio network Cost per hour of programming ( ) Radio 1 2,700 Radio 2 3,400 Radio 3 5,200 Radio 4 10,200 Radio 5 Live 5,300 Average 5,360 Television network Cost per hour of programming ( ) BBC 1 120,000 BBC 2 80,000 Average 100,000 Source: BBC Annual Report and Statement of Accounts, 1997/8

28 12 Industry Telecommunication Union, composed of member states. Other international bodies, such as the European Union, have developed telecommunications policies which encompass radio, though again, they are more concerned with controlling transmission than the details of content. Most regulation of radio, however, is by nation states, and it is at this level that the radio industry is shaped by the political and cultural values of governments. Legislation enforced by agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA, or the Radio Authority in the UK, controls not just the allocation of frequencies, but also the limits on ownership and rules over much of the content of what is broadcast, such as the amount of news or locally produced material it carries, or requirements for impartiality. This regulation can have a range of overtly political goals, such as reflecting the national culture, increasing choice or ensuring quality standards, but the underlying justification of control remains the notion that the spectrum is a public resource, and must therefore in some sense be made to serve public goals. The apparatus of regulation is small, but decisive, therefore. The radio services sector is much more diffuse, but encompasses radio advertising sales houses which help sell advertising slots, information providers (such as news agencies and travel-news suppliers), transmission and satellite services which lease and manage distribution networks for radio stations, marketing firms and specialist research companies which supply stations with details of listening figures and the lifestyles of their target listeners. Its size is difficult to gauge, but it is likely that wherever radio operators choose to slim down their range of activities and cut support staff in order to concentrate on what they see as their core business, a peripheral service sector will grow to support them. The most easily defined activities in the radio industry are broadcasting and production. Broadcasting involves the control of radio schedules and the actual transmission process, effectively creating the form of programming determining whether in broad terms it will be a general service of speech or music to a wide audience or a more targeted mix designed for a tightly defined group of listeners. It is usually based on a licence to operate for a certain number of years on a specific frequency, from a set of transmitters reaching a clearly defined geographical area. Production activity, however, creates the actual audio content of these broadcasts, the various programmes themselves, from individual news bulletins and traffic updates to music shows and documentaries, phone-ins and the commercial breaks in-between. Often, these two activities are conducted within the same organization, which might range in size from a small independent local radio station to a large national corporation. But the